The split between mkii and mkiv is now complete, the two versions no longer share any code. This is nice, but it also makes creating release notes a bit of a pointless exercise because numerous files have been renamed and code has been reshuffled.

Instead of going into details we just mention a couple of changes that were most noticeable in the diffs:

ConTeXt now assumes luatex version 0.70.1.

new mplib extension code (no longer a dual model using special colors and scripts)

bitmap inclusion in MP code

scalable colors in MP code as well as colors applied to textext() pictures

Many of the stubs for the ruby tools have gone away. If you want one of the old command names back, just create a link from mtxrun to the required name, e.g. copy mtxrun.exe to mptopdf.exe on windows. Eventually all perl and ruby scripts will be gone. Most functionality is already provided by lua variants.

The hyphenation patterns for German, German (old), Hungarian and Spanish have been updated from the tex-hyphen project.

New versions of the ancientgreek, letter, and simplefont modules are included.

New modules: barcodes (mkiv only) and punk

Support for shockwave flash has been updated (mkiv only). The backend code has been rewritten and currently only pdf is supported.

The split between mkii and mkiv is getting more complete. Only a few mkii bug fixes have taken place.

Typescripts are now split completely and no definitions are shared; loading of a mkio/mkiv file takes precedence over a tex file.

Note TeXLive 2009 ships with a broken MkIV, because the luatex on TeXLive is too old. Hans and I apologise for that, but it was just not feasible to include a newer luatex. Once TeXLive is released, we will write down a recipe to upgrade its luatex binary.

This is the first actually documented release for 2009 after a very long time of no release (and no release notes).The reason for that is that ConTeXt is now split quite rigurously into source files for mkii and source files for mkiv. Also, many of the core functions in context mkiv have been rewritten to make extensive use of lua. Unfortunately, this means that there is a massive amount of changes, and there is just no way I can create proper release notes. Just follow the link for a (long) list of new, old, and renamed source files. Taco 14:16, 12 October 2009 (UTC)